Talk:Develop Your Dungeon and Clutter

The first part of this page needs a total rework. Making a single room is nothing to a full cavern. Especially when you now need "CN" which makes little sense to new modders. (CN is for the hall) Then you get to the second room.

A listing of good things to use for the cave wouldn't hurt here. You can also meantion the fact that while for room everything needs to be at Z position of 0, however when the CNhall is place, you have to raise the position of the hall pieces to around 64 for it to even look good. Kinglink 20:05, 26 March 2006 (EST)

I agree

While this is my first crack at elder scrolls modding, I've modded extensively with the NWN toolset and wow I was like "OK got that first room done" and seeing the next step was like "Aw crap, oh well I'll just play the original campaign for awhile."

Playing the guessing game of deciphering which block to drop into the world is going to be a headache without some kind of preview pane or a key as to which pieces fit into which other pieces well.

(Also--Yes, had to figure out to either manually set the Z-value for the piece at 0.0 or just copy+paste the same value into every tile before attempting to line up or you'll be pulling your hair out)

I feel the power of the toolset and all its possibilities but definately need a stronger crutch to get started. Thanx

Don't Give Up!

The slowest and most frustrating part of working with any kit is learning it. While I agree that having to manually get everything on the same Z-plane is annoying (manual entry is a fine way to do this), it sounds like the main obstacle here is not understanding the cryptic names on the pieces. Stick with it, pull pieces out and play with them, and look at existing dungeons and tear them apart to see how we built them. Whenever I start working with a new kit I spend a few hours just doing this sort of experimentation to get inside the head of the artist who built them.

Once you get comfortable with the kit, you'll fly through laying out dungeons from scratch and get to focus on the fun stuff. JBurgess

Key:

Seeing that some people appear to be getting confused (I know I was), I've looked over the entire cave set, and fiddled with it a bit, to come up with this key:

C = Cave, N = Narrow, Rm = Room, S = Small, W = Wide, Trans = Transition Piece

So, for example CSRm = Cave Small Room, CWHall = Cave Wide Hall Etc...

Hope this helps some people. I've also managed to recreate the entire dungeon, and will come up with an edited picture at some point to name all the pieces. - Ephialtes

Perhaps that should be added on the article itself? I know I figured it out, but it would have been nice to have had that earlier. --Zonr 0 20:04, 3 April 2006 (EDT)

Need to crawl before you can walk

Thanks to the key posted, and some ripping apart other dungeons I was able to reconstruct something similar to what the map looks like (I think it matches up perfectly but not 100% sure). However it took my for ever! I had fun doing it (because I am a nerd with way to much time on his hands), but I can see how a lot of people will be turned off by this.

Give us the name of every single object used here, like in the room explanation. We can figure out the rest at a later time. When doing a tutorial, I for one want to know EXACTLY what I am doing, so if I screw up I know where and how. Exploration can be done at a later time. And thanks for the tutorial all and all very helpful.

UPDATE: I think I got the tutorial map exactly the way it should be. It is actually very easy. Just a little overwhelming at first. Just think how you would name every object if you were an artist and it becomes very easy. A detailed listed of every object is not needed, so discard my first request.

Just look at it like this, you have the prefix which represents the room. ex CS would be 'cave small' CRm would be 'cave room' ect. Then the tile name 'hall, floor, corner, ect'. Then a number representing the variations of art for that tile. Then A-D each letter rotates the tile 90 degrees.

So if you had CWHall01A it would mean it was a 'cave wide' (room), Hall, 01 (which is the first art variation of the hall), then A which is its direction. CWHall02B would be cave wide, hall, 02 (second art variation), B (rotated 90 degrees.

It actually very EASY so don't give up! --Fathead 02:17, 8 April 2006 (EDT)

Not Too Bad

I actually just jumped right into it without going through the tutorial very much. I learned enough to know that the pieces can't be rotated and they're classified so that they work together.

I see a lot of talk about manually setting the Z value, but I never had to do that. I just turn on grid snapping and go to town. But I definitely have to do a lot of adjusting to get pieces where I want, so perhaps I'm just doing it the long way...

--Tadrith

This is too time consuming..

This is to whoever did this tutorial. Everything is good about it up to this part. You expect us to sit down for hours and work out the puzzle? I cant even work out how to start of with the next CN piece. All's I know its a corner. Could you not list them all since you bothered making the entire cave? Tutorials shouldnt make someone work this hard. The entire point is to help you figure things out. THis is making us figure things out. Fill up the gap! The only way you can learn now is to look at other caves premade in the game.. Not too happy.--Xervish 06:41, 14 April 2006 (EDT)

Sorry you're having trouble. I added a note to the tutorial explaining myself, but I want to make a note of it here, too. In short, I do expect you to sit down for hours and work it out, otherwise I may as well upload the finished plugin and let folks download it without doing it themselves. The intention of this tutorial is to equip you with the basics to create a dungeon from start to finish in the CS; it's not a tutorial on how to use the cave kit. It's hard work, it takes patience, and there's not a way around that. Use the naming key that another user was kind enough to post, and yeah, certainly look at how other dungeons in the game were constructed; that's a great way to learn. Most of all - Stick with it. JBurgess 10:23, 14 April 2006 (EDT)

(Moved continued discussion to Xervish Talk Page) JBurgess 06:12, 17 April 2006 (EDT)

It works for me

I think this method to teach the editor works really well. At first it was really slow, but I was moving along at a fast clip by the end. I don't think it would help the learning process

And about having to manually edit every z coordinate... Are you crazy? Just turn on snapping, and hold down the z key to move the item along the z axis. The tutorial explained those steps. Maneuvering pieces isn't the hard part, finding the right one is.

It only took me about an hour to get the cave finished to look like the screenshot, and I think it's perfect, except for one piece. At the top right, with the CW pieces, there was one that I couldn't find. There's the passageway up that's needed, but I only have an "A" version of the piece, where a "C" was needed. Are the other 3 rotations of it accidentally left out, or is it possible to rotate this piece?

Anyways, thanks for the great tutorial JBurgess. Now off to make an Ayleid maze ruin.